Damn your feelings (but mind ours)
The saga over the Aston Villa versus Maccabi Tel Aviv football (soccer) fixture next month revealed a lot about how far our political establishment will go to defend Israel and to spare the feelings of its supporters. There has been a campaign to get the match called off, on the grounds that Israel is a genocidal state which should be treated as a pariah, as is Russia currently, for the past few weeks but last week the local Safety Advisory Group (SAG) recommended that MTA’s fans should not be allowed to travel to the game on the grounds that there was a strong likelihood of violence if the fans’ past record is anything to go by: picking fights with local Muslim minorities and singing offensive and racist songs (albeit in Hebrew, but they are not the only ones who understand Hebrew). They have, in short, a major hooligan problem and there was no guarantee that they would not get into, or start, a fight with Birmingham’s large Muslim community. The advice attracted scorn from the entire political class; it was accused of at best caving into antisemitism and at worst actual antisemitism; my former MP Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, opined that the way to oppose antisemitism was not by banning its victims. Meanwhile, the reaction from many of the Tories and parties further Right was to accuse the SAG of being afraid to offend Muslims, and accused local Muslims of being a threat to the visiting fans rather than the other way round.
Over the course of last weekend, events took several turns until the Israeli club announced that it would not sell tickets for the match to their own fans, which would mean there would be no MTA fans at the match. A man claiming to be the leader of Aston Villa’s own “Jewish supporters’ club” turned out not to be Jewish at all and the fan club turned out not to exist. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon then announced that he (and a bunch of his supporters) would turn out in support of the tourists; a derby match between MTA and another Tel Aviv side, Hapoel, had to be cancelled on advice from local police after riots inside and outside the stadium. The latter left a lot of politicians with egg on their faces; the former prompted the fake Jewish fan to change his position, calling for the match to be held behind closed doors with no fans, as had an earlier MTA fixture with a Turkish side (held behind closed doors in Hungary). Still, politicians continued to link the decision to bar the MTA fans to antisemitism, alleging that they never just banned away fans for this reason (not true), only when the away fans are Israeli, and brushed aside concerns about hooliganism, repeating claims that the violence in Amsterdam last year was a pogrom against them by local Muslims, ignoring reports from local police that the fans were violent and racist as well. Others were wringing their hands over our supposed admission that “Jews aren’t safe in Britain’s second city”, despite the fact that Jews live in Birmingham and travel there every day, and other teams with associations with the Jewish community (e.g. Tottenham Hotspur) have played there many times with no trouble, nor any reason perceived to ban them. The fact that they are Jewish, or that Israel is a Jewish state, has nothing to do with why locals do not want this group of fans in their city.
My solution would have been, instead of a game behind closed doors with no fans at all, to hold the match in a stadium away from Birmingham, fairly close to an airport if possible, where the fans could be bussed from the airport to the match, and then bussed back and flown out as soon as possible after it ends. This way, both sets of fans get to see their team play and antagonism to the local community is kept to a minimum. Two possibilities that spring to mind are the stadiums in Reading and Milton Keynes — both large, both within easy reach of Birmingham for Villa’s fans and within easy reach of Heathrow airport (and in MK’s case also Luton airport) for the Israeli fans, and crucially neither in residential areas where locals could be subjected to major inconvenience or antagonism.
However, I must stand in defence of the Muslim community who objected to holding the match in their area. Who can blame them for feeling uncomfortable with large numbers of Israeli football supporters with a record of violence coming into their area? The political space and media the last few months has been full of talk of the country being ‘invaded’ by asylum seekers described as “fighting-age males”, and any misdeed of one of them is held up as proof that they are all a menace; yet, we expect Birmingham’s Muslim community to tolerate this large group of actual fighters, people (men and women) who six months or a year or two ago were in an army whose main function was terrorising unarmed people, mostly Muslims, in their villages and orchards on the West Bank, protecting lawless, racist settlers who destroy their homes, crops and livestock, enforcing an occupation that has persisted for more than 50 years, with its regime of arbitrary detention, oppressive checkpoints, and a pseudo-justice system consisting of military tribunals, and who the past two years have been waging a genocidal war against the civilians of Gaza? When people said they didn’t want “Israeli hooligans” around, they were accused of antisemitism for suggesting that Israeli hooligans were worse than other football hooligans, but the fact is that other football hooligans are not war criminals.
According to police intelligence as reported in the Guardian last Tuesday, the fears were precisely about extremists linked to the club and not about danger to the Israeli supporters from locals: that Dutch police had told British police that the MTA fans instigated violence in Amsterdam and that scores of extremist fans with a history of racism and violence were expected to travel. The fans would have had to travel through London as there are no direct flights from Israel to Birmingham, which would have raised the possibility of further violence while they travelled to and from the game, and that specialist riot police would have had to be drafted in from across the country (this could, again, have been solved with charter flights and direct buses to a nearby stadium). The assessments were not made with any consideration of whether they could be interpreted as antisemitic or as ‘pandering’ or a surrender to antisemitism; they did understand that if you had not seen the intelligence, you could conclude that it was because the fans were Jewish; in my opinion, only bigoted Zionists — the sort that would not accept that the deliberate slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians after referencing an actual incident of genocide in the Bible was genocide, or that travelling Israeli fans could not possibly have started previous violence, even if local police had said so — would have concluded this.
Our political and media class are so devoted to Israel right now that they are willing to ride roughshod over local people’s feelings to allow some of the worst of them to come to the UK and roam around for several days, something which would not be allowed for a team from anywhere in Europe with such a record (and was not allowed for our fans when British hooligans were a major problem in the late 1980s and their behaviour contributed to a fatal disaster). With all the talk about whether the MTA fans were safe, and whether the police could police the match and the journey to and from it effectively, nobody seemed to be asking whether it was justified to impose any level of inconvenience on local people just so that a group of fans with a history of racist violence, from a country still engaged in an orgy of war crimes, could go to a football match. This would have affected everyone, but it was Muslims and Arabs (or anyone perceived as such) who were at particular risk from their behaviour, and this did not matter to politicians and the media, but all the while we see hand-wringing about how “Jews are not safe” because Israeli thugs are told they are not welcome, and indeed any time a strident criticism of Israel is made in a public forum. Sod everyone else’s feelings, but watch you mind theirs.
